I got a chance to shoot video on a 20 acre landowner-run prescribed fire at First Rain Farm, burn off of North Bloomfield Read, this week, just above Nevada City. I wanted to cover this project because it has often been difficult to get permits to do prescribed burns in the Sierra Nevada Foothills before the end of official fire season, and the tide seems to be shifting on this.
Burning in the late summer or early fall, before too much wetting rain, is important, because it can be hard to get fires to burn intensely enough to really reduce the fuel loading of much beyond pine needles and leaves once the larger fuels (thicker than a pencil) get damp. Burning ‘in-season’ allows for larger logs and branches to fully consume in the fire.
It was a beautiful late-summer day. Temperatures were in the high 80s, and the relative humidity dipped below 30 in the afternoon, there was not much wind.
Fuel conditions in the unit were pretty mild, as we were reburning a well-thinned area last burned in spring 2023. There were some large piles of madrone and oak slash left behind by PG&E thinning along a powerline ROW that added some heat. Outside the unit, the neighboring properties were what we call ‘doghair’ in the fuels business – unthinned black oak, pine, and madrone.
The burn was bisected by 3 huge old mining gullies, which made portions of the burn perimeter difficult to access, and added a bit of complexity to the timing of the firing. The landowner, Tim Van Wagner is a CARX-qualified burn boss who runs a fuels crew, and several of his employees are also working on their CARX State burn boss quals. They split the burn into three divisions, and had a pretty dialed operation. It was my first time working with First Rain. I was impressed.
It’s great to see the Nevada-Yuba-Placer Cal Fire Unit supporting WUI burns inside declared fire season, and I appreciate the level of trust Cal Fire has been building with local groups!